Remembering AIDS Victims: Michael Dowling’s Annual ‘Medicine Wheel’

BOSTON Since 1992, Michael Dowling has marked World AIDS Day each December by creating a public art installation he calls “Medicine Wheel.”

“It represents the wheel of life forever evolving,” the Boston artist has said.

Saturday, he again invited people to gather for a day-long vigil at his circle of 36 shrines inside the Boston Center for the Arts Cyclorama to remember AIDS dead and reflect on the cost of the pandemic. Each year, Dowling and his assistants pick an element as their theme. This time around it was Earth. So in the center of the shrines they laid out a circular field of stones surrounded by blue columns that evoked the ocean shore.